GSE UK Conference, hosted at Whittlebury Hall in the United Kingdom on October 30 – November 2, offers attendees the opportunity to gain new knowledge, tips and guidance on different products from experienced industry professionals. Through user and vendor-led sessions, GSE UK events are designed to reduce the chance of errors and help save time and money. gain knowledge that will help your entire team increase efficiency, agility and save money including education and training costs. The event features more than 250 technical sessions across enterprise IT topics including Security, CICS, DB2 and MQ to name a few.
Open Mainframe Project will be represented at the event by several ambassadors, contributors and leaders. Check the schedule below:
12 pm: New Mainframers Talk Candidly (continued) – Earl Dixon, Tech Lead for the Broadcom Vitality Program and frequent speaker for the Making our Strong Community Stronger Initiative
Other speakers include Niall Ashley, Katie Juhala and Zdravka Oysolova
12 pm: Db2 and Zowe. Everything, everywhere at once! – Joe Winchester, Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, Zowe community member and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM
A challenge facing mainframe Db2 shops is how to become more agile with modern tooling, yet leverage the existing resources and skills that power their z/OS systems. Zowe provides a way to do this through its Visual Studio Code plugins, its browser based web desktop, and its command line interface. This allows Db2 shops to leverage their existing JCL and REXX libraries, their existing stored procedures, their existing SQL scripts, and surface existing resources in new form factors for DevOps tool chains, for automation, for operations, and more. These can be used by existing and novice mainframers, providing a bridge between familiar open source tools and Db2 on z/OS. This talk will demonstrate the power of the new ecosystem with real world examples and customer success stories.
4:45 pm: Goodbye to Baby-sitting your z/OS Jobs with Zowe Integrated JCL Checking (demo) – Domenico D’Alterio, Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, Zowe Community Member and Principal Product Manager at IBM
Take the worry out of programming your jobs, checking and double checking for code standard compliance, ensuring DevOps processes are delivered while meeting business SLAs for your hybrid cloud applications by allowing IBM Z JCL Expert to do the heavy lifting for you. In this session, come and discover the ease with which IBM Z JCL Expert, when integrated with Zowe, helps you automatically check your jobs as part of your CI/CD pipeline in a fraction of the time it would normally take, allowing you to focus on the more value-adding functions of your role. A live demo of the Zowe integrated features will be shown in the session.
8 am: Keynote – The Mark and Steve Show – Steven Dickens, Vice President and Practice Leader at the Futurum Group and Mark Wilson, Architect, Technician and Project Manager at Vertali Limited
10:15 am: Mainframe/Zowe Tutorial – Germanas Samrickis, Software Engineer at Rocket Software
Mainframe Hands-On Lab Session for those who have zero or limited experience on mainframe. Lab excercise covers usage of VSCode, Zowe and ZOAU.
Purpose of this lab is showcase how smooth and enjoyable experience could be using modern tools. This session is not intended to be a deep dive. Instead, it serves as a guide on how to get started, with the expectation that you can pursue a deeper dive into the subject on your own.
Max Capacity: 20 attendees
10:15 am: Zowe plugin development using the “Realtime Dataset Metrics” as a sample – Alex Agoltsov, Senior Software Engineer at Rocket Software UK
The idea is to show what is needed to create and maintain the Zowe plugin.
I’m going to use the “Realtime Dataset Metrics” Zowe plugin from OMEGAMON for Storage as a sample, showing best practices, and processes (architecture, testing, unit-testing, development, CI/CD, communication layer and etc.)
1:45 pm: Wowee it’s Zowe, the new face of the mainframe – Joe Winchester, Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, Zowe community member and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM
All of the old with all of the new. The Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe tooling aims to bridge the gap between folks new to the mainframe familiar with distributed and open source technologies, with the rich set of existing mainframe runtimes and tooling that exists on the platform. This is done by bridging the worlds with browser front ends, Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ plugins, Chatbots, and command line interfaces. By being open source and extensible Zowe not only provides base function out of the box, but supports a depth of vendor plugins making it ideal of DevOps modernization or building custom mainframe dashboards with its SDK. This talk will cover Zowe from end to end, and showing how it is fast becoming ‘The New Face of the Mainframe’ for experienced and newbie mainframers alike.
1:45 pm: Automated testing of COBOL Sections! – Rune Christensen, Contributor to COBOL Check, Open Mainframe Project Ambassador and Lead Software Engineer at Bankdata
Want to test your COBOL sections? Want to run it on your laptop? Test driven development with fast feedback inside Visual Studio Code? Mocking of programs, CICS calls and other sections, enabling truly isolated tests? Pipelines with test gateways, denying failed tests to be deployed? Dashboards showing status of tests, and team usage? All of this is in your reach! Look no further, in just 50 minutes I will show you COBOL Check; that will change your COBOL experience!
10:15 am: I get my CICS on route Zowe – Joe Winchester, Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, Zowe community member and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM
This presentation will show how to use open source Zowe tooling to develop, administer, deploy and test CICS applications. We’ll show how to:
This presentation has content for experienced CICS developers and system programmers, as well as newcomers who want to learn how to interact with CICS through a CLI and through Visual Studio Code.
11:45 am: Automating PTF Maintenance Using an Open-First Approach – Jan Prihoda, Product Owner at Broadcom Mainframe Software
Historically, software management has leveraged SMP/E. More recently, mainframe vendors collaborated to introduce and recommend the z/OSMF-based alternative using Portable Software Instances (PSWI), Workflows, and Software Update. Both methods work well when the target LPARS are limited, reside on the same physical device or are within a sysplex. But for organizations managing hundreds of LPARs, deploying new software or applying the latest maintenance can be challenging to manage, time-consuming, frustrating, and downright painful. In this session, we will demonstrate an automated alternative – developed specifically for customers eager to solve this problem – powered by Zowe CLI, Ansible, and z/OSMF.
1:45 am: Zowe Extensions in IBM Z System Management (demo) – Domenico D’Alterio, Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, Zowe Community Member and Principal Product Manager at IBM
Zowe™ technology delivers new ways to integrate IBM Z system management into the enterprise processes and applications, protecting the investment made on IBM Z. Zowe helps to make the IBM Z platform easier to learn and use for next-generation IT staff and developers. Come and learn how IBM System Management offerings like IBM Z System Automation, IBM Z NetView and IBM Z Workload Scheduler, expand Zowe framework with specific extensions to have an easier way to integrate Automation of system, applications, processing and more in a hybrid cloud environment. A demo of the ZOWE CLI extensions available for the products listed above will be performed during the session, to show the value add in the data center management of them. Come and learn about use cases that leverage REST API for Automation as well as CLI extensions of Zowe in an hybrid cloud environment.
For the complete schedule or to register, visit the event website here.